


Ball-Pen

by orphan_account



Category: AFI
Genre: Fluff, Humor, M/M, highschool
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-01 23:59:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2792408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Davey's kid brother is having a party at Chuck-E-Cheese. Somehow, he ends up in a room full of plastic balls with Jade's hand down his pants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ball-Pen

**Author's Note:**

> Have any of you ever been to a Chuck-E-Cheese? It's a really terrifying pizza joint for kids with games and gigantic jungle gym things to play on. They always scared me. 
> 
> This story employs a number of tropes I'd been wanting to mess around with...namely the Vegan From Birth Davey trope, and Jade's high school awkwardness. I had a blast writing it, so hopefully it's as fun to read.

Davey was so pissed off. 

He was at _Chuck-E-Cheese_ in, for one. The place was _named_ after an animal byproduct made by an industry that _tortured_ cows. They might as well call it Chuck-E -Tortured-Cow. Or, Chuck-E-Pus-in-the-Milk. Or Chuck-E-Genetic-Engineering. 

Davey jotted these down on a napkin, brainstorming propaganda stickers. His hair, which his mom called The Fuzz Wump because it was styled in a complete lack of style which involved gel, hairspray, rubbing his head violently into his pillow while he tried to sleep, and infrequent showering, was in his face. He stared through the tendrils of it that interrupted his vision. He stared at the creepy mouse on his napkin, its ugly face obscured by his fucked up handwriting. 

The Cheese was just the beginning. On top of that, he was at his kid brother’s birthday party. Davey wasn’t the kind of kid who _hated_ his kid brother or anything, but that didn’t mean he wanted to _go to his birthday parties_. He felt incredibly awkward. All the moms and nannies kept on staring at him and his Fuzz Wump, and his denim jacket with the Teen Idles patch on the back of it. The Teen Idles probably sounded like a band of delinquents to them. The moms and the nannies probably missed all the nuance of the pun in the title. They also probably all drank. They didn’t even _know_ the superiority of the social order he was supporting by wearing a Teen Idles patch. 

His brother screamed at one of his friends, the fat one with the robot on his shirt, who screamed back. There were words, probably, but Davey couldn’t tell. He couldn’t distinguish them over the sound of sad, lonely mooing. The sound of tortured cows. He scribbled out Chuck-E-Cheese on Chuck-E’s shirt, and replaced it with _meat is murder._

Then, he heard his mom say: “Smith, you can leave the present on the table, I’ll take care of it. You go find the other kids, they’re in the tunnels.” 

Davey’s head snapped up, and his eyes swept the room. If Smith Puget was here, maybe Jade Puget would also be here. He craned his neck, trying hard to get a good look past the bulk of elementary schoolers milling around the table, which smelled like cheese, which smelled like torture. And there, slouching to make himself look shorter, he was. 

Davey didn’t really know why he had such a fucking crippling crush on Jade Puget. Sure, he was older, and sure, he was one of the like, _four_ other punks in Ukiah who weren’t also skinheads. But he wasn’t _hot_. He had terrifically jacked up teeth, and legs that were long in a bad way, and the biggest wrist and knuckle joints Davey had seen on any living human ever. But then there was the fact that Davey stared at Jade’s _hands_ long enough to make that comparison, so whatever. There should have been a better reason, but there wasn’t. Davey just liked Jade. 

It was awkward though, because Davey hardly ever talked to Jade. He made him profoundly nervous. He spent a lot of time spitting on the pavement (even though his mouth was usually dry) and shuffling his feet a lot and smiling dorkily and saying, “yeah, me too!” a lot when he was around Jade. 

Davey froze as Jade made eye contact with him, and nodded to him, grinning. He grinned back in a hectic, crazy kind of way, his cheeks getting hot. He hated himself for the minute it took Jade to disentangle himself from kids and parents, and walk over to the very lonely end of the table where Davey was sulking. Once he got there, Davey stopped hating himself, because he was too busy being nervous. 

“Dude. I am so glad to see you here. I was gonna hang out in the parking lot until the cake came. Then I was gonna steal some cake, and then book it out of here with Smith. I’m on babysitting duty,” Jade announced, gesticulating. That was another gross thing about Jade which should have turned Davey off but didn’t. He seemed like a naturally quiet, introverted guy. But he was weirdly friendly. He talked to people, and _gesticulated a lot_ (though there was very little variation in his gesticulation, it was a repeated motion of him holding his right arm out like there was an imaginary beach ball underneath it and moving it in tiny micro-motions as he talked; Davey could imitate it and _hated that he could imitate it_ ) even though he was bad at talking and at gesticulating. He subjected people to his awkwardness, which meant he was somehow cool. But he had like, no natural charisma. Or he _shouldn’t_ have had natural charisma, but he did. 

“Me too,” Davey said dumbly. Then he turned redder, and cleared his throat. “I mean, not the booking it with cake thing. Or the babysitting thing. I’m just stuck here.” 

“Yeah,” Jade said. Awkward, friendly. With that weird hand motion. 

“Yeah. Um.” Davey dropped his head, hiding behind his hair a little. He wasn’t normally a socially inept person, but Jade brought that out in him. It was like Jade’s social ineptitude rubbed off on his surroundings. It was a contagion. “I’m glad you’re here too, though. I’ve been sitting here choking on how bad the air smells, drawing shit on napkins. It’s a sad story.” 

Jade sat down next to him, cocking his head. He had really huge eyes, and Davey could see himself reflected in their darkness. It was at this moment that Davey noticed that around his very black, very big left eye, Jade had a ring of swollen, red-purple flesh, like someone had tried to punch his lights out. “What, you don’t like pizza?” Jade asked, incredulous. 

Davey wrinkled his nose. Jade should have lost points, right now. But he didn’t. “No. Not _cheese_ pizza, anyway, which is basically _every_ pizza.” 

“You don’t like _cheese?_ Who doesn’t like cheese?” Jade asked amiably. 

“Well,” Davey said, hopping atop his metaphorical soapbox of sorts. “I’m a vegan. Which means I don’t eat any animal byproducts. Including cheese, or milk, or basically any dairy.”  
Jade raised his eyebrows, then winced because from what Davey could see, it tugged on the tender skin of his black eye. “Why dairy? I get being a vegetarian, but what’s wrong with cheese?” 

Davey loved his question. He was very glad that he and Jade were talking about veganism, because Davey was fairly certain that without a topic fueled by rage and superiority, Jade’s presence would render him otherwise silent. But there was nothing in the world, not even his weird crush on Jade puget, which could silence the furious voice of his veganism. “Because dairy cows, and chickens on egg farms or whatever they’re called, are tortured. They’re put in insanely small cages, and fed really shitty food, and they chop their beaks off so they can’t peck anything. And Dairy cows are given tons of hormones so they produce tons of milk, and their udders are attached to machinery which makes them all infected and full of pus. So basically, there’s pus in cheese pizza,” he paused, for effect, and blinked dramatically. “Gross, huh?” 

Jade nodded thoughtfully, playing with a straw on the table with his unearthly fingers. Usually, this was the point in Davey’s graphic dairy-tales that people got grossed out. They usually decided that they were horrible people and made hollow vows to become vegans, or they got all weird and bristly and defensive and talked about how they had really needed protein because they were anemic or something. Davey waited anxiously to see what Jade’s response was going to be.

“Hmm. Well I guess that’s the price I pay for the greatness that is cheese,” He drawled. Then he smiled a closed-mouth smile, so Davey couldn’t even be grossed out by his jacked up teeth. 

It was not what Davey was expecting. His face fell. “But _pus_ , dude. Pus. In your cheese. Pus in every mouthful.” 

Jade shrugged. “Pus is no grosser than blood.” 

“You drink blood?” 

“Sometimes,” Jade said nonchalantly. 

Davey stared. 

Jade stared back. Then he said, “Here,” and pulled his right foot up onto the chair he was sitting on, so his knee was bent in front of him. Then he proceeded to very carefully roll the baggy black ankle of his pants up to the joint, revealing a very white, very hairy shin, and a series of nasty looking bruises that matched the one around his eye. 

“Did you get in a fight?” Davey blurted. 

“Kind of,” Jade answered, voice distracted. “Went to a show. Took some punches.” 

Davey’s stomach crawled, his insides bunching together like they were alive and sentient. Jade Puget and his white, hairy calf _should not_ have been attractive. Jade Puget’s bruises, and this show where he got punched, _should not_ have made him mysterious and charming. “Oh,” Davey said, cheeks hot and mouth dry. 

His eyes dropped to the bony jut of Jade’s kneecap, where there was a scabbed over thing that looked half-burn, half-scrape. “I got this skidding across the cement floor in board shorts,” Jade explained, applying pressure with his creepy long fingers to either side of the abrasion. “Let’s see if I can get some pus out of it.” 

Davey’s eyebrows tried to fly off his head. “ _What_? No. We’re at my brother’s birthday party. We’re at a _table of food.”_

“You care if I profane a table of tortured cow pus pizza?” Jade asked drolly. 

Davey had nothing to say to that, so he just got up on his haunches and leaned over Jade’s knee, hopefully shielding the grotesque spectacle from his mom’s most likely critical gaze. He peered down, heart beating fast at this new revelation of Jade’s skin, of his skin _in pain. Torn._ It was so weird. They hardly ever talked because of Davey’s incidental paralysis, and here they were, two pairs of eyes fixed on Jade’s scab. 

Jade squeezed, and beads of clear fluid rose to the surface. Davey gasped, bit his lip. His dick twitched in his pants. 

“Lymph. Not pus,” Jade declared. “Ah well,” he bent his head, the top of it messy with gelled tawny curls flashing in front of Davey’s face as he _licked the lymph off of his half-burn half-scrape._ Davey thought his life was probably over, because this was probably the sexiest thing he had ever witnessed in his fifteen years of life. He wondered what it said about him that his stomach was dropping and his dick was half-hard against the zipper of his jeans because he just witnessed Jade Puget licking his own scab at a table at Chuck-E-Cheese. Probably that something was wrong with him. He didn’t even care. _He didn’t even care._

Jade whipped his head back up, eyes closed, triumphant grin twisting his lips just before he stuck his tongue out. “There you go,” he announced, very-big, very-dark eyes opening. “Do I have permission to eat a slice of pizza now that I’ve eaten my own pus?” 

Davey nodded solemnly. “You have my permission to do whatever the fuck you want,” he said. 

Jade’s eyes flashed, and he grinned. Davey’s short-lived giddiness born from watching Jade be insufferably hot even though he shouldn’t be hot at all wilted and died in his gut at the way Jade looked at him. It was scary. Their eyes connected in a scary way. He felt kind of panicked, so he swallowed, eyes darting to his lap, breaking the scary-thing. 

“Hey,” Jade said. “You want to go to the ball-pen?” 

Davey looked up again, in spite of himself. “Huh? You mean the dirty, germy cesspool of kid puke and hypodermic needles and possibly venomous snakes? I thought you wanted to eat your hard-earned slice of pizza.” 

Jade stood up, shrugging his jacket off onto a chair. He was wearing a white sleeveless shirt, and Davey could see all the planes of skinniness it clung to. He pinched his own thigh, trying hard to kill his boner. It was a fruitless effort. Maybe a nice, brisk walk to the ball-pen might be better for the job. “Yeah, I’ll get to that eventually. But mostly I want to get to the ball-pen.” 

Davey followed suit by standing and taking his own extra layers off, even though he felt ridiculous and really _didn’t_ want to go to the ball-pen. “But there will be _kids_ there. I hate kids.” 

“Yeah, so do I. But don’t worry, I’ll scare them away.” Jade grabbed Davey’s arm, and Davey’s gut fell off an internal cliff. “Come on, let’s go.” 

\---

As Davey was dragged across Chuck-E-Cheese with his wrist clamped in the creepiest, jointiest hand in existence, he made the observation that Chuck-E-Cheese was pretty much a casino slash hamster cage for kids. It was really weird. Kids played games for tickets and exchanged them for cheap-ass toys, or they crawled through multi-color mazes of plastic tubes. He felt like he was in an alternate universe. This feeling was, of course, enhanced by the fact that his wrist was clamped in the creepiest, jointiest hand in existence. 

“I don’t think we’re allowed to go in the ball-pen. I think we’re too old. Or too tall,” Davey complained, really not wanting to get kicked out of the place his brother’s birthday party was being held at. His mom would probably kill him. He tossed the Fuzz Wump out of his face, tripped between hordes of kids with tickets in their fists. 

Jade shrugged. “No big deal. We can pass for middle schoolers. Okay. So there are three ball-pens here. Two are for little kids, and they’re not covered so parents can watch. But there’s one towards the top of the tunnel structure that’s dark, and covered. I think we have to take that purple tunnel over there.” He pointed. 

Davey was pretty sure they could not pass for middle schoolers. He was also pretty sure he wasn’t going to fit in the entrance of that purple tunnel. But Jade was already trotting over there, getting on his hands and knees and sticking his head inside. He looked like a giant, punk hamster. He poked his head out a final time. “Okay. Coast is clear.” 

Jade disappeared into the chute. Davey made an unintelligible noise of frustration. He didn’t _want_ to be stuck in a tunnel with a child-sized circumference behind Jade’s ass. His boner was no longer a boner, but he doubted it would remain that way were he to be behind Jade’s ass. But he was alone, at the foot of a tunnel, in a room full of mostly eight year olds, with half a boner and a Vandals shirt on that was already garnering looks of warning. So, in he went. 

He propelled himself upwards, using the joints in the plastic tubing to as tiny grip-holds for his tennis shoes. It was kind of claustrophobic, which was not helped by the proximity of Jade’s ass mere inches from his face. Davey felt like he didn’t really fit safely in here, but Jade was way taller and ganglier than he was, and he seemed fine, so he tried hard not to complain. Occasionally, a kid would come sliding down the tunnel, and he and Jade would have to press themselves against the siding of the tube to admit the tiny, germy body. Davey felt totally contaminated. 

The expedition seemed to go on _forever_.

Weirdly, Jade knew where he was going. He kept on taking turns into different colored tunnels, and climbing around corners like he fucking _was_ a hamster and _lived_ in the tunnels of Chuck-E-Cheese. Davey was pretty certain that he would get lost if he tried to recreate their path on his own. It was really super scary, the idea of being stuck in this intestinal network of casino slash hamster cage for kids without a guide, so he stuck to Jade, eyes fixed on his ass. 

They eventually came to a level in a green tunnel, and Jade shouted “left!” pointing with his gross, bony finger, to an opening. Beyond that opening, Davey spied the promising rainbow of multi-colored plastic balls. 

There were four kids who looked like they were between nine and eleven crowding the entrance to the ball-pen. They thought they were tough. Jade crawled on his hands and knees right up to them, and poked one in the ribs. “Hey,” he said. 

The kid stared at him, eyes wide, until one finally piped up “Hey!” He thought he was a toughest. He had a Karate Kid shirt on. He was probably going to try and Wax On Wax Off Jade in the face. Jade would probably get another black eye. 

“I’m seventeen,” Jade said. “And I have a black eye. So I think you should leave,” he told the kids. 

And as easy as that, the kids nodded their heads, and scrammed right down the tunnel, past Davey and Jade. Davey could not fucking believe it. Maybe Jade was a witch, or something, and had weird supernatural powers that made him seem threatening and or sexy when he was neither. “That was way too easy! How did you do that?” He asked, staring at the kids retreating backs. 

“Sometimes you just gotta ask,” Jade said, grinning. He surveyed the ball-pen in all its vacant, expansive, colorful glory. “Look! All empty,” he announced, making his stupid awkward hand-gesture. He jumped in. “Water’s great.” 

“Eww, can you feel the germs?” Davey yelled, squirming on the edge of the ball-pen. He wasn’t even _in there_ and he could feel the germs. He could practically _see_ them. He could definitely _smell_ them, the residual rubber- eraser and sweat and sugar smell of children. 

“Dude, I licked my own knee-pus. You think I have very well-tuned germ sensors?” Jade flailed in the rainbow-sea of plastic balls. “Pleeeeaassee come in with me. I want to show you something.” 

That got Davey’s interest. What could Jade _possibly_ show him in a ball-pen besides kid-puke, hypodermic needles, and possibly venomous snakes? He was curious. He had a massive, debilitating crush on Jade. He jumped in, too, because he was stupid. 

Unlike Jade, his skin was immediately alight with the sensation of billions of germs permeating his clothes and making him germy. “Ewww!” he bellowed, clawing through the nasty plastic towards Jade, who he clung to. It was so not his plan to touch Jade, or to end up hanging around his neck like a koala. He just wanted as few balls as possible to touch him, and the best way to do that was to put the majority of his body on something that wasn’t balls, and instead was Jade. He realized what he was doing, and flung himself off of him, backwards into infected plastic. “Whoa, sorry dude.” He coughed, trying to sound manly.  
r32;Jade laughed. “I don’t care.” His arm had actually been _supporting_ Davey when Davey was all over him. The ghost of it still burnt on Davey’s lower back. He struggled against the very-scary suck of plastic balls. 

“What were you going to show me?” He shouted, voice echoing amidst so much plastic. “This is so disgusting. I can feel myself getting scummier by the minute.” 

“Nothing,” Jade responded, grinning with his _awful_ teeth. “Just wanted to get you in here with me.” 

His mind flatlining into wordless, outraged static, Davey smacked Jade, hard, on the arm. Just reached for it and walloped. Jade looked genuinely shocked, and caught Davey’s wrist as Davey went for the second hit. “Dude, I’m covered in bruises. Watch where you punch me,” he bitched, but his voice was wheezy and weak with laughter, and he wrestled Davey away, kicking blindly under the sea of balls. 

“You are such an asshole. Is this what you do to people, make them swim in dirty _balls_?” Davey almost shrieked, grinning fiercely, elated even though he was probably going to die of gross over-exposure. His crush on Jade. Damn. It was a real thing. It was actually making him happy, giddy, _stupid_ to be struggling through a cesspool of kid-nastiness with someone who didn’t even have objective attractiveness or veganism going for him.

Jade snickered at him, and their hands locked together, holding one another at arms length as they play-fought. The tension between their locked elbows kept them apart, but Jade suddenly bent his elbows, sending Davey crumpling into his chest. “Gotcha,” he barked, wrapping his freakishly long, freckled arms around Davey’s shoulders, clasping them in front of them both, and dunking Davey into the fucking _balls_ , face first. 

Davey would have screamed, but then his mouth would have been open in the _ball sea_ and he would have gotten _ball germs_ in his mouth. So instead he just kicked wildly in panic, trying desperately to free himself from Jade’s inexplicably strong grip,nails scrabbling against any flesh he could reach.

Jade yanked him out, then dropped him into the pit of plastic. “You’re such a little germaphobe. No pus in your pizza, no ball-germs in your mouth.” 

“Blech,” Davey panted,running his tongue fervently against the top of his mouth. “Not _those_ kind of ball-germs,” he said before he realized what a not-cool thing that was to say.

Jade should have paused. He should have made a weird face, he should have _given Davey time_ to fumble over his thoughts for a minute, to come up with a witty retort to make his Freudian slip look like an intentional joke, instead of the mortifying exposure it was. Instead, Jade didn’t wait a fucking beat. He said, “Oh yeah? The other kind is fine, though?” One of his eyebrows was raised. He was smiling what could have been mistaken as suggestively. 

Suddenly, it all made sense. _Jade puget was flirting with him._

How could he have been so stupid and self-absorbed that he _missed_ it? It seemed really fucking obvious now. Come on. Jade tried to gross him out, Jade dragged him around by the hand, Jade teased him, Jade wrestled him in a ball-pen. It was the perfect formula for flirting, at least by third-grade boy standards. Davey stared at Jade, realizing he didn’t actually know how to flirt, at all. Definitely not with Jade Puget, who had suddenly regained the ability to make him quiet and awkward and bumbling again. “Uh,” he said, trying not to drown, trying to keep his head above balls. “Yeah. The, uh, other kind, the not-seven-year-old-snot kind. Is preferred.” 

Jade nodded, brow still cocked up into a delicate V over his huge eye. “I see.” He swam away from Davey, doing an inelegant back-stroke through the multi-color plastic. “We’re in the wrong kind of ball pen for you, then,” he called to Davey, over the din of screaming children. 

Rolling his eyes and kicking a graceless doggy-paddle towards Jade, Davey wondered if he had actually been wrong about the whole flirting thing. Maybe Jade was just even more confusing and awkward than he initially thought. It wasn’t that hard to believe. 

But then, when Davey was close enough, Jade reached across the divide, and fisted his hand in the front of Davey’s Vandals shirt. He pulled him close, huge eyes less huge because there were half-lidded. Davey was forced to notice how nice Jade’s lips were at this distance, even though he’d been trying _desperately_ not to notice all night. “Can I tell you something?” Jade asked, voice low. 

Davey treaded balls. “Um. Do I have a choice?” His cheek burned, and he audibly gulped. “You’re holding me in place.” 

Jade loosened his grip, but only minimally. “I didn’t eat a slice of pizza earlier because I hoped I’d be kissing you tonight. I didn’t want to subject you to to the pus of tortured cows.” 

Maybe there was a parallel universe where Davey was actually a suave, clever fifteen year old. However, if there was, he was currently not occupying it, because his response to that potentially romantic confession was, “Just _your_ pus.” 

Jade’s cheeks colored. “Hm. Good point.” 

Davey realized how off putting and discouraging his existence was, and his cheeks colored even more than Jade’s already colored cheeks. “No. I mean, I don’t care. About your pus.” His voice dropped to a whisper, and he stopped resisting Jade’s tugging arm and relaxed into him. even though they were in a fucking ball-pen at fucking Chuck-E-Cheese and he should be suspicious of anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to seduce a guy in a ball-pen at Chuck-E-Cheese, especially at his kid brother’s _birthday party_. “I actually thought it was really hot. When you licked your knee. I know that’s weird, but I did. Whatever. Guess I’m weird.”

Jade’s gaze dropped, and he laughed nervously. He flattened his palm across Davey’s chest before sliding it up his shoulder and around the nape of his neck, where it rested with tentative weight. “Sooo...” he asked, drawing the word out. Their legs knocked together, and Davey’s left thigh accidentally slid between Jade’s. “Can I?” Jade finished. 

Davey didn’t trust his voice at all, so he just nodded emphatically and closed his eyes. He could smell Jade all around him, Jade’s deodorant, Jade’s hair gel, and then, just before lips came colliding wetly into his own, the sweet, pepsi-soda smell of his breath. Jade didn’t waste any time shoving his tongue past Davey’s lips and flicking it against the roof of his mouth. Davey got the distinct impression that Jade hadn’t kissed a lot of girls, because there was basically no preface of romance or tenderness of any of the stuff you had to bullshit your way through when you were kissing girls so you could get your hand up under their bra. Jade was all tongue and teeth and palms scraped over Davey’s back. It was fucking great. 

Their bodies slid together to a chorus of wet sucking noises and plastic balls clicking together as they shifted to accommodate their motion. Jade was _really_ kissing Davey, so hard it felt like their mouths were actually fucking, like it was _sex_ with _their mouths_ instead of kissing. Jade’s hands tried to curl through his hair but met too many snags and knots and tangles, so instead they slid down Davey’s sides, one digging into his lower back and sneaking fingers past the waistband of his jeans to he could grip his ass through his boxers. “Oh my god,” Davey groaned, arching his back and pushing his ass into Jade’s palm. 

“Yeah,” Jade said breathlessly, catching Davey’s mouth and kissing him again, sucking on his lower lip before tilting his head back for air. “I think you’re so cute. Always check you out at lunch, with all your patches and shit. You’re so fuckin’ cute.” 

Davey’s stomach twisted, dropping into the throbbing heat of his erection. “Wow,” he said, shaking his head, breathing hard. It was a stupid thing to say, but he was reduced to one syllable responses at this point. He leaned back into Jade, kissed him hard, tonguing the uneven surface of his front teeth. 

They were getting really into it, backed up into the mesh siding of the ball-pen, grinding together in such ernest Davey was pretty certain he could actually get off and come in his pants if they kept at it, mouths sliding messily together, mouths fucking. But then, he heard it. 

“Happy birrrthday, to you, happy birthday to you, happy _birrrthday_ dear Mikey...happy birthday, to you!!!” crowed in the voices of fifteen to twenty children. Davey broke away from the kiss, flailing through balls in a panic, ripping Jade’s hand out of his pants.

“Fuck! My mom. She’ll kill me,” was what he managed to get out before scrambling across the ball pen towards the exit. “Come on. We can make out later.” 

Miraculously, he had paid attention to the grueling expedition to the ball-pen, and was able to navigate the tunnels from memory, green to blue, blue to yellow, yellow to orange and orange to fucking purple. 

He slid down the purple chute until he was deposited on the floor of Chuck-E-Cheese in a pile of limbs, the Fuzz Wump even Fuzzier and Wumpier from Jade’s insistent pulling the the static in the tunnel maze. He stumbled through terror of kid-friendly arcade games, skidding to a halt right beside the familar table of screaming Mikey-friends. Chuck-E himself, in his full mascot costume of creepy mouse glory, was conducting another round of Happy Birthday, his arm around a terrified-looking Mikey. 

Davey cut his eyes to his mom, who was so busy snapping pictures of Mikey and his almost-tears that she didn’t even seem to notice he was gone. He sighed, letting out a great huff of air and letting himself look at Jade, Jade in his too-tight white shirt, with his black eye and his weird knuckles. Davey licked his lips, which felt raw and swollen, and Jade sidled up next to him. 

The mouse and the children sang. Davey could hardly hear it over the sound of his own heart beating. He remembered the tortured cows as his nose was again assaulted with the overwhelming, greasy reek of cheese, and the singing kids and his freaked out pulse were joined by the third voice of sad, Smiths-song mooing. 

“Hey. Want to come out to my car with me?” Jade asked without looking at him, yanking him back to earth. Both of them kept their eyes fixed on the birthday boy and his birthday table, which was being bestowed with a huge, white, frosting-heavy birthday cake from another costumed animal, possibly a duck or a chicken. “I want to show you something,” he added, voice thick in his throat. 

Davey swallowed, heat roiling in his stomach. “But you wanted a slice of cake. That’s the only reason you came, right?” 

“Well,” Jade admitted in a low voice, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He clasped his hands together in front of him. “Not the only reason.” 

“Oh.” 

“Yeah,” Jade said. “So. What do you think. About my car. And coming out to it.” 

Davey pursed his lips, trying not to grin too ecstatically. If his mom or his brother saw him grin, they’d might think something was seriously wrong, and start paying unwanted attention to him again. So he tried to keep up his placid, sober appearance. “As long as there isn’t a secret ball-pen in your truck, I think I’m up for it,” he said very evenly.

“Okay. Cool.” 

“No cake?” Davey asked, letting his eyes dart briefly to Jade. 

Jade shook his head. “Nah. Probably tons of pus in that cake, anyway.” 

“Probably,” Davey said. Then, Jade grabbed Davey’s wrist with his creepy hand, and dragged him off to the parking lot, out of Chuck-E-Cheese, away from the cacophony of tortured moos.


End file.
